SEC Staffers Fiddled While Investors Got Burned

Posted By
The Gilbert Law Group

We wrote back on April 29, 2010 about what some SEC staffers were doing
while Bernard Madoff was busy perpetrating a massive fraud against his
investors. Some high-level employees, including SEC attorneys, were spending
as much as eight hours a day watching porn on their government computers.
Now comes word from The Denver Post that, in response to a Freedom of
Information Act request by Denver attorney Kevin Evans, the SEC has disclosed
that 33 SEC employees and employees of private contractors in the SEC’s
Denver Regional Office and six other locations were investigated for accessing
pornography sites on government computers during working hours. Seventeen
of the employees had senior status and earned at least $99,356 in annual salaries.
In an earlier disclosure, the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) says
that 24 of the employees who were investigated either resigned or were
suspended, counseled or reprimanded. It is unknown if any of those investigated
were involuntarily terminated. A federal judge in Denver has ruled to
protect the employees’ privacy by not releasing the names of the
those involved.
It is our observation thataside from the moral implications of porn-watching
it really doesn’t matter if the slackers were spending their days
shopping or just randomly surfing the internet. The fact remains that
taxpayers were paying these people handsomely to do the government’s
work, including work investigating Madoff and other swindlers for the
protection of the public.
Don’t we have the right to expect more integrity from our public
employees, especially from those in supervisory positions? After all,
while the supervisors are figuring out ways to waste their time, what
are the people they are paid to supervise doing?